


you’ve got no voice

by alderations



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Anger, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Derealization, Flashbacks, Gen, Grief, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Memory Loss, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trans Character, dysphoria if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:13:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26550439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alderations/pseuds/alderations
Summary: It’s something so dumb that sets him off, just a split second where Marius hits a wrong note during rehearsal and Jonny’s voice cracks and then he’s stuck.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 142





	you’ve got no voice

It’s something so dumb that sets him off, just a split second where Marius hits a wrong note during rehearsal and Jonny’s voice cracks and then he’s stuck.

His voice hasn’t caught like that in years. With several millennia under his belt, he’s had plenty of time to train himself into acting like anything but an immortal teenager, and that includes masking the fact that he’d been on T for mere months before his death. According to Carmilla, at least. He plops to the floor, since he doesn’t sing the next song anyway, but his fingers clench too tight around the microphone until his nails threaten to bend back under the pressure. No one notices. Of course they don’t notice, because Jonny’s always a cranky asshole, so how would they know the difference when he’s really fucked up? They don’t. Easy.

But the song ends, and he doesn’t stand up to narrate them into the next, and that’s when the silence grows tense.

Someone says his name. If he had hackles, they’d raise, but god forbid his body transmit the messages he needs it to send. He can’t move. One hand gripping the microphone, the other wrapped around his own ankle, he grits his teeth tight enough to hear them creak in his head. “Jonny, what’s wrong?” Marius repeats.

Jonny forces his mouth open, but that’s not enough to actually summon words. What the fuck is wrong with him? He tries to get a grasp on what’s happening to his body—his feet are starting to tingle, but that makes sense since he’s crouching on the floor, but he’s not sure why his head feels so light and hazy. And  _ hot.  _ He feels almost feverish, and the lump in his throat could easily turn into an ache. Maybe he’s getting sick? That’s unusual, but not impossible. He tries to remember the last time he got a cold, or better yet, what it felt like to get sick before he was mechanized, but there’s nothing there.

Of course there’s nothing there. That thought is what cements the rage spiraling in his chest, forming it like blown glass into something that can and will shatter at the slightest touch. He’s furious, but usually when he’s this angry he’d just… punch Marius, to start. Tell him to get out of his face and fuck off. Still, he’s frozen in place, as if he fell into the endless mineshaft of his own anger and now he’s lying at the bottom, every bone in his body cracked and useless.

He has nothing to be angry about. Well, he has thousands of things to be angry about, but nothing new. His voice cracking is—it’s irritating, sure, but it’s also  _ stupid  _ and therefore not the reason he’s so furious. Marius fucking up can’t be it, either; they all fuck up on a regular basis, and he rolls with it. It’s something deeper, and that requires him to think through the blistering heat in his head, so he uses that heat to weld a fucking shovel and he digs. 

_ My mother was a tailor, but she never sewed me shit. _

Random detail. Okay. That’s another stupid one, so Jonny shoves it aside. Why did that even come to mind? He manages to shake his head a bit, which only makes him more aware that the entire crew is watching him as he sits here, frozen.

_ He said, “I forgive you, son…” _

Ugh. Not that one, either. That’s not as stupid, but his self-loathing is as constant as the laws of physics, so that wouldn’t tip him over the edge.

_ “...to be injected directly into the brain.” But when he shoots, just before he shoots, Jack grabs the barrel of the gun, and instead of a clean shot in the temple it blasts his mouth half off and leaves him shredded and bleeding but still very much alive as Jonny sets the casino ablaze. _

Jonny gasps a breath as he draws back to reality, because that one always hurts. It’s fitting, he thinks, that the first time in his damn life that he made a decision for himself, it was with someone else’s hand literally guiding his own.  _ Fuck  _ Jack. His eyes are threatening to well up with tears now, which will smear his makeup everywhere and then he’ll have to reapply it and it’ll look stupid and he’s not holding the microphone anymore, it’s rolling away across the floor because his hands are shaking. Brian picks it up and turns it off so the godforsaken feedback will stop. Jonny forces himself to breathe and digs down again.

_ He wakes up on a table, in a lab, under the calculating eye of a woman who feels his forehead like a mother but watches his pulse race like a predator. He wakes up, and he has no idea who he is. She says “you’re Jonathan Vangelis,” and he thinks no, that can’t be right. _

The funny thing is, he can remember the rest of it—mother, father, Jack, even his siblings and the horses and the time before Carmilla mechanized him—but even clearer, he can remember coming back to live with no idea who he was or what he had been before.

Ten thousand years, give or take a few million, was a very long time to reinvent a memory.

He hates this. He hates being hung up on who he is and who he was, and this is why he’s always drinking and killing and killing and drinking to erase the fucking void where  _ he  _ should be. But once it starts running through his head, there’s no stopping it. Are his memories real? Any of them? Plenty of the old ones, he can credit to Carmilla, recounting his own life story until he solidified it in song and slowly, painstakingly, reinvented it for his own mind. But after that, he has no one to blame but himself. He remembers the first time he slaughtered a Rose Red, how her blood was barely remarkable on top of her hair and her clothes and the fury pouring out of her in an unabating torrent. He remembers being cooked from the fucking inside out on the Moon, while Tim and Bertie watched with horror in their human eyes during every flash of gunfire. He remembers watching Nastya’s blood fall off the exam table in twirling rivulets as the doctor replaced it with quicksilver, and he never bothered to ask but he’s pretty sure that she saved the original blood to eat later, and he tries not to think about that but—Nastya. Nastya.

His head hurts so bad, he wants to pluck his eyes out. Nastya. He let her go. She’s gone, it’s his fault, and he’s never been great at communicating with the Aurora, but even he can feel her grief when it stains every molecule in their lives. It’s been a hundred years, at least, since he last saw Nastya, so how is he supposed to know that she’s real?

That thought is what finally stirs his tears to falling, and moments later he feels a hand on his shoulder. Still, he can’t move to shoot whoever it is. He’s trapped, and she was never real, and the crew might as well be figments of his imagination, because how the fuck is one human brain supposed to keep up with all the memories of a life this long?

A hand on his chin tips it up, fingers light and hesitant, until his eyes meet the deep brown of Ashes’. “Jonny,” they murmur, searching his face. “You with us?”

He wants to be. He can’t fucking stand this. But if they aren’t real, if none of his memories are real, how—

“I can see you thinking. Can you focus on my voice?”

Jonny would never admit as much out loud, but they do have a nice voice. He summons all the strength left in his present self and nods.

“Good. You’re here, on the Aurora, with the rest of us. The Mechanisms. We’re outside the far reaches of the Yggdrasil system, which we just wrote an album about. We were rehearsing. With me so far?”

Hearing it in someone else’s words makes it easier for Jonny to put the pieces back together, and Ashes keeps their hand firm on his shoulder even as they let go of his chin and help him to his feet. Everyone else is still watching him, because they’re nosy bastards, but he can’t bring himself to care. “Ashes,” he croaks, once he finds his voice again. He doesn’t care how crackly it sounds. “How many of us are there?”

“Nine,” they respond instantly, and then they glance to the side, face twisting with guilt and grief. “Nine. Eight of us in this room, and Nastya.”

Jonny’s breath shakes in his chest. “So she was real?”

Behind Ashes, Brian sits up straight and furrows his brow. “Of course she was real. Are you implying that we’d forget her?”

“No.” Jonny has a matter of seconds before he can’t hold in his tears, but he’s staunchly ignoring that fact. “Never. I just—I thought—I’ll tell you about it later, I just… needed to be sure.”

His face crumples, and Ashes pulls him into their shoulder without another word, wrapping him up in their arms and whispering meaningless reassurances as he sobs. “It’s okay,” they tell him, over and over again. “We won’t forget her. It’s not your fault.”

It is. But they’ve had that argument before, and Jonny doesn’t have the energy to rehash it, so he just clings to Ashes and cries. Mercifully, the rest of the crew decides that rehearsal is over, and most of them head off to find dinner, while Brian and Ivy stay behind until Jonny regains enough energy to lean away from Ashes and face reality. He doesn’t speak again, but there’s something in their eyes—both of them—that says there’s no need. So he sends Ashes on their way, mumbling an unintelligible thanks, and collapses back into Brian’s arms, with Ivy curled around his back.

“They don’t get it,” Jonny insists. He’s not just talking about Ashes, but the whole crew—the ones who work, whose mechanisms do what they’re fucking meant to. “I can’t—I can’t explain…”

Ivy squeezes him. “They don’t. And they probably never will.”

“Doesn’t mean they don’t love you,” Brian adds.

Jonny’s nose crinkles, as it always does when faced with any genuine emotion regarding his crew, but he doesn’t protest. “You can’t tell anyone I said this,” he hums into Brian’s chest, “but thank you. Both of you.”

He feels them stare at each other over his head.

“Any time,” Brian answers at last.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this on my phone in a Starbucks parking lot because a) I’m angry and projecting and b) when the angst grips me, it fuckin grips me!!
> 
> Please let me know if I missed any tags. Never posted a fic from my phone before lol. Comments & kudos are beloved, and so are all of you. 💚 take care of yourselves.


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